Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoeCortopassi | Hacker News Reader

This ad isn't about the merits of IE as a browser, this ad is about building a preformed thought in the common users mind whenever they hear someone bash IE. IE hasn't been the victim of bad PR, it has earned it's reputation through years of blood/sweat/tears by the hands of developers. Microsoft recognizes that they won't be able to change this attitude in the developer community, but that they can lessen the weight a developer's opinion has amongst non-technically minded people, which is a much larger share of users.

Like it or not, a lot of people will think of this ad first (and what it tells them), the next time one of us tries to warn them about IE

View on HN

Sometimes when trying to make a point or advertise a product the simplest things are missed. In this ad "Try IE" is missing. The ad itself claims "progress" and "not as bad anymore"... but there's no call to action. I could make a fallible argument that the ad itself says IE is worse than all the other browsers - because it never says you should use IE... just that IE isn't so terrible.

It'd be a bad argument, but that's why I really don't like this ad - it's a (mostly) negative ad and emphasizes a negative point (how bad IE is perceived), which is not how you change people's thoughts. This video has many repetitions of IE SUCKS in it. If I were advertising a product, no matter what people thought of it, I wouldn't be flashing "my product sucks" all over the place for the majority of the commercial in order to make the last 5 seconds try and turn that on it's head.

You change preformed thoughts by repeating "my product is now great" over and over, not "my product isn't terrible anymore!"

With all 300 views...I doubt it will change anything at all.

(EDIT: MY opinion will say the same until that view counter says a million and I highly doubt it will even get close. The only people who really care anyway are the "trolls" that Microsoft is talking about!)

Usually a video with 301 views means it's suddenly exploded virally. YouTube 'stops counting' temporarily at 300 views whilst it verifies that a video is being legitimately viewed by many people in a short space of time, rather than people artificially inflating their viewcount by whatever methods they can.

In a matter of minutes or hours that number will suddenly increase significantly.

So it's an anti-spam measure. There's a short explainer here: http://www.seroundtable.com/youtube-301-views-15347.html

Further confirming this, the video has 301 views and over 1800 likes, 400 dislikes.

It's at 216,000+ in under a day... I think it's safe to say it will hit a million.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com